These few sentences carry a bundle of deceptions. The socialist and communist parties who supposedly “dominated” the government were duly elected by the Chilean people and adhered strictly to constitutional procedures. They attempted to “socialize Chile,” but the Times did not explain what that phrase meant, what the government actually did, what programs it started for the people. Instead, “socializing Chile” was presumed to have been something reprehensible. The Times said the government met “stiff opposition from the upper and middle classes. In fact, it met political violence and economic sabotage. Nor did the armed forces “finally” side with the regime’s opponents after much scrupulous neutrality; far from being “nonpolitical,” they plotted and conspired from the first months Allende took power, purging their ranks, aiding the efforts of right-wing terrorists, and disarming the few on the left who had guns.
For the destruction of Chilean democracy, the US press tended to blame the victims themselves. Thus in an editorial immediately after the coup, the New York Times noted, “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself. Even when the dangers of polarization had become unmistakenly evident, he persisted in pushing a program of pervasive socialism for which he had no popular mandate.”24
The last to be blamed by the US press for the military takeover was the military itself. Also free of blame was the US government, which financed, equipped, trained, advised, and assisted the Chilean military before, during, and after the takeover. The leading US newspapers took pains to report there was no evidence of US involvement in the destruction of Chilean democracy. To reach this conclusion they also had to ignore the economic war waged by Washington and the CIA’s funding of opposition right-wing political parties and media in Chile.
When Allende was in office, and long after his death, he was inevitably described as a “Marxist” by the US press, which he was, and his government was often called “Marxist,” which it was not, being a loose coalition of left-leaning political groups, some of which were reformists and decidedly non-Marxist. In contrast, neither General Augusto Pinochet nor his government was ever described as “fascist”—which they were—by any of the establishment news organizations in the United States.25 Allende’s democratically elected government was “the Allende regime” while Pinochet’s dictatorship was more respectfully described as “the Chilean government” in the years immediately following the coup.
The day after he was murdered by the generals, Allende was portrayed unsympathetically in the New York Times as “a man of the privileged class turned radical politician,” known for his “dandy” ways and “stylish dress.”26 And a few days later: “Allende was very much a political animal, a small stocky, quick-moving man with gray moustache, ruddy face, thick, heavily rimmed spectacles.”27 In contrast, the Times described Allende’s executioner, General Pinochet, as “a powerfully built six-footer,” “energetic and very disciplined and until recently he never talked politics.”28 He was also “quiet and business-like” and though “tough” he had a “sense of humor.” Certainly here was a mass murderer we could all warm up to.
It was Pinochet’s unmentionable fascism rather than his vaunted “sense of humor” that had the upper hand in his regime’s treatment of political prisoners arrested after the coup. The tortures delivered upon Pinochet’s victims included application of electric shock to different parts of the body, particularly the genitals; forcing victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives; raping women in the presence of other family members; burning sex organs with acid or scalding water; placing infected rats into the vagina; mutilating, puncturing, and cutting off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injection of air into women’s breasts and veins (causing slow, painful death); shoving bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death.29
By 1980, six and a half years of Pinochet’s rule had given Chile continued political and economic oppression. Yet the New York Times could headline a story: “CHILE’S REGIME SEES NEW ECONOMIC HOPE,” a kind of positive framing never accorded the Allende government. In upbeat tones, the opening paragraph told how Pinochet ordered the construction of a new $20-million jail. His willingness to respond to prison overcrowding, the Times maintained with a straight face, reflected “both sensitivity to social criticism” and “a new ability to pay for public investments.” Pinochet believed his policy of free-market capitalism “offers solutions to basic problems like jobs, housing, health and social security.”30 The Times remained willing to give the freemarket dictator the benefit of the doubt, even if it meant offering doublethink sentences like this:
Critics of [Pinochet’s economic policies] generally agree that the situation today is an improvement over the breakdown in 1973, but they emphasize persistent unemployment, which is about 15 percent of the labor force, and indications that wealth is increasingly concentrated in an elite, with wage earners and peasants making less than before.31
In other words, the economy had improved but the people were worse off. In fact, Pinochet’s critics did not agree that the economic situation in Chile under the dictator represented an improvement over the Allende years.
Outdoing the Times was Shirley Christian of the Miami Herald. For years she produced stories about how Pinochet was adored by his subjects, how he had rescued Chile’s economy from Marxist ruination, how he was “like an iron-willed father pounding at the head of the table,” and how he was “tough” and “in charge. ... He speaks his mind... . Peace. Tranquility. Order. Pinochet has brought Chile those things”32 (not the tyranny of military rule, mass arrests, executions, disappearances, and torture).
In 1984, eleven years after the coup, the New York Times was still cooing over General Pinochet, describing him in one news story as “the Chilean President” and “Chile’s leader” (never as “Chile’s dictator”) whose “68 years are belied by his boxer’s physique, matched by a trim grey moustache.” He “seemed relaxed and expansive as he sat down to breakfast in ... Moneda Palace.” The Moneda’s previous occupant, “Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist, died inside.” (Allende was murdered by Pinochet’s forces.) Pinochet, continued the Times, “has managed to stay in power through what even his opponents recognize is political acumen . . .”33 (not terror, death squads, and US military aid).
After chiding Pinochet for “his excesses,” a Times editorial praised him for having “brought order to street and factory and renewed economic growth,” while “the poor were consoled with record levels of social spending.”34 In fact, Pinochet’s policies brought a drastic drop in real wages, an upward redistribution of income to benefit the rich, a sharp growth in unemployment, a huge increase in the foreign debt, a fall in savings, massive corruption and racketeering by the military, and heartless cutbacks for the poor. The milk program for Chilean children was abolished almost immediately after the generals came to power, and health, sanitation, housing, and community services were subjected to drastic cuts. The public sector was sharply reduced in a massive bargain-priced sell-off to private business.35
In 1988, fifteen years after the coup, the Times still could not stop heaping praise upon the Chilean dictator for having transformed Chile’s “sluggish, copper-dependent economy” into a success story “based on private investment... . This transformation would not have gone so far so fast had not his economists been backed by the regime’s dictatorial powers. Reform attempts in such nearby democracies as Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador are even now continuing to falter.” Here the New York Times endorsed dictatorship over democracy as the means to creating “economic success.” But success for whom? Even the Times had to admit that “left behind [were] large numbers of the urban poor, who live less well today than they did 15 years ago.”36 What we were not told is that the prime beneficiaries of Chile’s “economic success” were the top military and the rich corporate investors.
For all their profes
sed dedication to democracy, the US media have been less critical of democracy’s mortal enemies in Chile than of capitalism’s democratic opponents.
STOMPING ON GRENADA
In 1983, when the US government invaded the tiny and relatively defenseless sovereign nation of Grenada (population 110,000), in an unprovoked assault and in blatant violation of international law, killing scores of the island’s occupants and defenders—the American press pretty much went along with it. To be sure, there were editorials in newspapers like the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the New York Times denouncing the invasion. (The Post eventually flip-flopped and came out in support of the aggression.)37 And there was a long article in the Times that, while not criticizing the invasion itself, raised questions about the Reagan administration’s “deliberate distortions and knowingly false statements” in regard to the military action.38 The press also strongly criticized the barring of reporters and the censoring of information from Grenada during the first two days of the invasion.
The overall media thrust, however, was to accept the US action as a kind of natural happening. The first question reporters asked President Reagan during the press conference at which he announced the invasion was “Is it true that two of our helicopters were shot down?” an inquiry that implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the attack, focusing on how we were doing and not on what we were doing. Correspondents like Jack Smith of ABC News and commentators like Bill Moyers of CBS positively aligned themselves with the aggression, seeing it as a necessary “mission” to restore democracy.39
Most of the press went along with the White House claim that the invasion was a rescue operation on behalf of American students at the St. George medical school. Time magazine headlined its cover story: “Rescue in Grenada.”40 Ignored were the medical students who testified that they were never threatened by the Grenadians nor by Cubans, nor prevented from leaving the island. (The New York Times did mention these latter students a week later—in the thirty-eighth paragraph of an article on Grenada.41)
The press accorded generous exposure to the official view that Grenada was a Cuban military bastion. Grenada’s “defenders were Cuban—and extremely well armed,” reported Newsweek.41 Time described them as “well-armed professionally trained soldiers.”43 They were reported to number as many as “1,000 to 1,500 Cuban troops.”44 In fact, only 784 Cubans were found on Grenada by US forces, exactly the number Castro said were there. Only a handful were military personnel, the rest being construction workers, medical personnel, and diplomatic personnel with their children and other relatives.45
On the second day of the operation, when the Reagan administration announced that the invasion was not merely a rescue operation for the students but for the entire Caribbean, the US press went along with the revised and expanded version. The administration claimed it had discovered enormous warehouses full of “deadly armaments” and “secret documents” that purportedly showed Grenada was, in President Reagan’s words, “a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy.” Footage of seized arms caches supposedly representing a “massive arsenal” sufficient to arm “8,000 to 10,000 terrorists” was given top play by the three major networks, the newsweeklies, and most newspapers. “American military sources say they were staggered by the depth and strength of the Cuban military presence,” reported ABC.46
Eventually when journalists were allowed to visit the island, some sent back reports indicating that the arms cache actually consisted mostly of defensive small arms, enough to equip an army of about two thousand, hardly the stuff to terrorize and dominate the entire Caribbean.47 Contrary to what the State Department claimed, the “secret documents” contained “no evidence that a terrorist training base existed or that Cubans had planned to take over Grenada,” the New York Times belatedly and inconspicuously reported.48 The major media gave these corrective reports nowhere near the prominent play accorded the government’s original charges.
All three networks accepted Reagan’s view that tiny Grenada was of enormous military and strategic value to Cuba and the Soviet Union without explaining why, except to transmit unquestioningly the Pentagon’s fantasy that a revolutionary Grenada would allow Havana and Moscow to control crucial oil tanker lanes through the Caribbean. A CBS correspondent argued the US government’s case this way:
The Grenadians said their new all-weather night-and-day airport, with its 10,000 foot runway built by Cubans was for jumbo jets carrying tourists. Washington said, “Nonsense.” The Grenadians said the new port facilities under construction were for banana boats. Washington said, “No way.” Washington believed this tiniest Caribbean country was being redesigned from a tourist haven to a Communist airbase and a way station, a stopping-off point for Cuban soldiers on their way to Africa, for East Bloc supplies on their way to Nicaragua. ..,49
And what Washington believed was what the press told us. The State Department offered no evidence, nor did the press demand any, to support the assertion that the airport was for military purposes. Anyone familiar with the special requirements of military airports, including their underground storage and special defense facilities, would know that the Grenadian airport was a civilian one—and was being built not only with Cuban help but with investments from a number of Western capitalist countries, including Great Britain.50
The experiments in grassroots economic democracy and social justice, which were the hallmark of the New Jewel government, constituted a side to the Grenada story that the press left entirely untouched. Under the New Jewel, grade school and secondary education were free for everyone for the first time. Free health clinics were opened in the countryside (thanks mostly to Cuban assistance). Unemployment dropped dramatically from 49 to 14 percent in three years. Free milk and other foodstuffs were being distributed to the needy, as were materials for home improvement. Cultural and sports programs were set up for young people. Measures were taken in support of equal pay and equal legal status for women. The government leased unused land to establish farm cooperatives, and sought to turn agriculture away from cash-crop exports and toward self-sufficient food production.51 None of these developments was reported in the US media, either while they were happening or as background material during the invasion.
The 1984 election in Grenada, like the invasion itself, was a US-sponsored and -financed operation. The New National Party (NNP), described unblinkingly by the Washington Post as “forged under the guidance of Caribbean leaders who worked with Washington in last year’s invasion,” won every seat in the parliament, while American soldiers policed the island. The NNP, continued the Post, was “singled out by U.S. diplomats in private conversations as the best vehicle to return Grenada to stable government.”52 Headed by a pro-US unknown named Herbert Blaize, the NNP and groups sympathetic to it received substantial funding from various conservative organizations in the US and from the Free Trade Union Institute (funded by the US State Department through the AFL-CIO).
After the New Jewel government was destroyed by the US invasion, unemployment and economic want in Grenada began to increase sharply. Oblivious to the possibility of negative developments, the New York Times talked about “a new moderate Parliament and Prime Minister committed to peace and stability”—thereby implying that the New Jewel government had been committed to war and instability. “Since the avalanche [NNP] election victory,” the Times claimed, “Grenadians have been in an especially cheerful and festive mood.”53 The only supporting testimony by Grenadians that the Times offered was from an unidentified “young man” who reportedly said: “We’ve got a good man [Blaize] now and everything’s going to be O.K. ... We’ve got the Americans with us.”
To the above cases we could add studies of how the media have treated—or mistreated—Cuba, Zaire, Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, East Timor, South Africa, Cambodia, Turkey, the Dominican Republic, the entire Arab world, including Palestine, and most other Third World nations and regions, an undertaking
that would fill many volumes. What becomes apparent in the cases already presented are the patterns of omission and distortion, specifically the way the news media (1) leave unexamined the premises and self-serving claims of US foreign policy and accept the White House perspective at face value, confining critical commentary to operational matters; (2) downplay or ignore US sponsorship of reactionary repression and the repression itself; (3) suppress descriptions of the content of Third World struggles for national independence, economic justice, and revolutionary change; (4) reduce Third World struggles to an encounter between a virtuous United States and demonic adversaries. I will deal further with these and other patterns in the next chapter.
For the New World Order
As seen in the previous chapter, the news media transform pro-US autocrats into “tough leaders” and popular insurgencies into “totalitarian aggressions.” This chapter offers several more case studies of how the press does its part to sanitize the use of US force and violence against countries that adopt a course not in keeping with the interests of US global hegemony.
THE “TOTALITARIAN” SANDINISTAS
The United States invaded Nicaragua seven times in this century, crushing popular insurgencies, occupying that country for an extended period, then installing a puppet military autocracy under the wealthy Somoza family. Nicaragua was made safe for big landowners and American investors. Labor unions were enfeebled or banned outright, thereby helping to depress wages and keep profits high. During these times Nicaragua had a rich ruling class and an impoverished people: 5 percent of the population owned 58 percent of the arable land; the Somoza family alone owned 23 percent; almost 60 percent of the people were unemployed, and 50 percent had a yearly income of $90; about 80 percent of the population was illiterate. Half of Nicaragua’s children suffered from malnutrition and almost half died before the age of four.1 The press had little to say about these class inequities and the role of US power in maintaining them. Like so many other US-supported dictatorships, Nicaragua was treated as part of the “Free World” to be defended from communist aggression by Washington’s global military machine.
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